Shooting deer with .25 condor! Any advice?
Trying to get some advice on shooting deer with well placed head shots. I have a talon tunes fully blown condor. Any advice on pellets? Distance? Ext? Trying to get it on video. Thanks for any info.
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The skull is the thinnest between the eye and the ear. So if close enough on undisturbed deer that would work.
Members here, who shall remain nameless, have done the ear canal shot and it worked with the 22 condor.
I once killed a wounded 3×4 point mulely with a S&W 22 escort pocket pistol, the bullet failed to penetrate the skull, flattening out against the bone, but it blew chips of bone into the brain.
On frontal shots the 22 always seemed to rock their head back and then they ran away. I felt it was the slant of the skull that caused the failures, just like a slanting black bear skull will.
My shrine to Elmer was two 4 cavity gang molds for the 429421 next to an original late 1950’s vintage Ideal mold, they fed a 1963 Mdl 29 for over 35 years.
Roachcreek
Very well said RC. 🙂
Been reading Elmer since i could pick up a gun magazine.
Ok here is a Question for you.
Our friend here seems intent on his voyage of taking a deer with his 25. So i would say use heaviest slugs possible with the 25 at peak power with accuracy, with a shot to the side back to front of the skull and try and use the ear canal.at shortest range possible
He said he was in a small wooded area. so no room for following wouded deer or room to let run and bleed out.
What says ye.
A rib will offer far less bone mass and as result less deflection than a skull. And no you will not have a blood trail, if your not an experienced woodsman with excellent tracking skills and know your killing ground intimantly you will loose the deer.
As far a survival, we are all a heartbeat away from having to live off the land, it is always better to know how to do it, and never need to, than to not know how.
It is the skill and the mindset to survive. If someone wants to break the law to experience that and learn, that is their business not mine.
A man who purchased part of the ranch I grew up on asked me years later after I had sold all the land, if there had been a bad winter, for he found so many deer skeletons. I just smiled
A good example of how not to survive, were the residents of New Orleans during Katrina, waiting in the open for the goverment to save them, the ignorant city bred fucks got exactly what they deserved.
I would have made a small fortune with a solar still, made from flotsom, selling drinking water myself.
Yeah, Elmer at one time had a shrine built to him in my house. 😀
Roachcreek
Elmer always said
(two holes bleeding was always better than one hole bleeding.)
I just don’t think a 25 Condor would have enough penetration to punch thru the skull reliably. Maybe a hotrod 25 condor with the heavy slugs.????
My 22 condor will shoot thru a 2×4 at the muzzel with a 32 grain eunjin
at 1000 fps. and go 3/4 way thru a 2×4 at 36 yards. will that penetrate a deers skull????
And a lung shot would just be out of the question. you would have to aim between the ribs.???and the hole left would be minimal with what kind of blood trail.??
A man has an obligation to take game in a fashion that will reliably put down an animal quickly and humanely.
were not talking survival here.
Not to mention the legal aspects!
Here we go again…
we ARE talking grass eating forest rats here & Not Dangerous game
OK that said I agree More Gun but I really don’t see how a .25 Condor is that much Less effective than the Black powder loaded .25-20 which was once touted as great Bambi medicine, so much so that Winchester built 1892 lever guns in the round in a special configuaration for the New England Deer hunter
I mean sheesh guys
what do you think folks used rounds like the .25-20, .32-20, .38-40 & .44-40 for anyways when they rounds were introduced in the late 19th century???
in the original loadings they are roughly equavilant to the performance one gets out of a .25 Condor, a .308 Corsair or a .45 Haley
these rounds were never power houses and the reality was most folks were more likely to use a black powder .32 or .38 rimfire, {even less power} on venison than the waaaaay more expensive centerfire rounds & rifles.
as far as headshots…
I agree overall with RC but for different reasons than what he uses
the reality is most folks are unable to reliably make them
I never had a problem, then again I came to age tramping the forests of the Northwoods killing whatever moved, usually with a .22 semi auto Ruger pistol.
Yes you can do them, particularly if you are spotlighting but its nothing I would advise a relative novice to do on a regular basis by any means and you damn well better be close range, like 20 yards which is doable spotlighting or from ambush in a stand if you play your cards right.
one more point thats lost on folks today is that conicals are less effective killers than round ball. Elmer Kieth interviewed a number of Civil War and Indian Wars vets who verified this simple fact and it was as well spoke of by a number of the mankillers on the old west who chose to continue to pack cap and ball six guns long after the advent of breech loaders as the round ball was simply a far more effective man killer than the conicals used in fixed ammunition.
You see its not just mass at play in the murder equation its also ballistic dump. If your projectile passes through your quarry, that is wasted energy. The round ball sheds its energy extremely fast in flesh resulting in a total trasfer of ballistic energy thus a cleaner kill.
Toyed with round ball versus conical for years in .44 Dragoons. A conical generally passed clean thru cats, even medium sized canines and they continuied to run.
use a round ball with the same amount of FFF, the feral is dumped right over dead.
The woods Im going to hunt are very small people are everywhere outside the woods. The only thing I have thats small and is quiet is my airgun so the mission is on. Ill def post some pics. Ive killed plenty deer with subsonic 22 rounds out of my rifles. All in the head they all died. Always to the side of the head or in the back of the head. A couple didnt die immediately they dropped but stood up I gues brain dead than I them again and it was over. How do I get in contact with jerry N do i haft to do any mods to my gun to shoot the slugs? With power wheel on 11 with 2900 Im shooting 980s for first 6 shots around about. Thanks Again. Have a tin of 43 grain samyang. Whats your opinion on using the samyangs I have? Just ordered new tank setup for my luxfer 4350 from joe so im def not gonna have prob running out of air. Def hate when that happens. Im gonna hopefully try out this week if weather slows down been raining non stop. Think around 11 inches here. Most people def wouldnt relize that a hundred pound doe can be deboned and fit in a normal sized jansport bookbag…
I would use a deer rifle on a deer.
Yes , here is some advice , forget it.
Get more Gun.
Let me give you an experiment to perform to show the difference between hitting a juglar and a heart and a lung.
You will need 6 inches of 1/4 inch id poly tubing, a grapefruit and a gallon ziplock bag and a large brown grocery paper bag and some tape.
Place the grapefruit in the ziplock bag, blow up the ziplock as much as you can before sealing it, tape the tubing in front of the grapefruit, then put it in the brown grocery bag.
Study the location contents, then go back to 25 yards and shoot 10 shots offhand at where you think the tubing is. Of course the tubing is not where it would be on a deer, but again we are experimenting.
Now offhand shots, because that is how you will shoot in the field, nothing is killed off a bench.
It is cheating because you do not know the exact location of the juglar on a deer, and you will know where it is in the sack, but again, this is just an experiment so it is okay.
After ten shots, how many times did you hit the known location of tubing representing the juglar? How many times did you hit the grapefruit,representing the heart, and how many did you hit the gallon ziplock, representing the lungs.
Now if the grapefruit was armor plated by a skull with various angles put around it to deflect bullets, how many times would it have penetrated the skull at an offhand 25 yard shot?
Now do you see why I shot for the heart and lungs?
Roachcreek
Shooting for the juglar is worse than a head shot. It is a smaller target, and one thing you can depend on in shooting game with small calibers, things are never the way you envison them to be when you start out.
The deer moves, the wind is blowing, a twig is in the way, you take a bad shot, a myriad of factors will conspire to make you miss that exact spot.
The heart and lungs are a huge target, a lowly 22lr out of a 4 inch barrel is doing around 1000 FPS with a 40 grain bullet, it will bring them down, the 25 condor with the heavier bullet will give you the penetration you need. But it is like killing with a poisen arrow.
That deer will not drop in its tracks, and that is the result you will always have with small caliber subsonnic ammo on deer size targets. You must be a good woodsman to follow that deer and retrieve it. You will have some blood, but not very damn much. Yo must not pressure that animal after the shot. If you can’t track well or the conditions for tracking are bad, do not take the shot.
I used solids when I did it, I wanted the penetration, if you hit a rib and your chances are 50/50 you will, it will cut down on the pentration, but the thing to remember about a lung heart shot, the rib is the only bone you wil break with that 25, and if you hit no blood vessel, that deer will escape and heal quicker than you can imagine to live another day. The head or neck shot deer are not as lucky. I have taken deer and upon field dressing them and seen healed lung shots from 22’s.
Always, always, take broadside shots, never a frontal shot.
You will want to get close, and hopefull not seen by your quarry when you take the shot, close because you will want all the FPE you can get to translate into penetration.
If you are doing this for meat, take a backpack and one or two black plastic bags. You will want to bone it out on the spot. Make a dorsal inscision from behind the ears to the tail, and down the front of the front shoulder to the knee and down the back leg to the knee. Peel the hide back and then bone out the meat. The back strap comes out as one piece and the ham can be removed in one piece from the bone. The front shoulder is removed and the body used as a table to remove the meat in two or three peices. Then remove the neck and rib meat , turn the deer over and repeat the process. You do not need to even gut the animal, and it is prefered that you do not, but you do need to open the gut cavity to get the tenderloin and the heart and liver if you eat those.
I did this every two or three weeks for years and years, I got so I could be walking away with a pack full of boned out meat in less than 25 minutes. Once home put it in your vegetable refrigerator trays with the racks below the meat to allow it to drain the blood away from the meat.
Buy a Cabela’s electirc meat grinder, they are so handy.
Age it for a week to 10 days and then grind everything but the backstrap, and a few roasts if you like, package it with the Seal a meal food processor.
A tip: you do not need to add fat when making hamburger, it just adds a bad element to your meat, why contaminate the best meat with the worst, fat. It will fry up and stick together without the fat, use olive oil for your oil instead of the fat.
Battlefield casuslities from the civil war when hit in the chest with pistol calibers and lunged, and no blood vessels were hit, healed up from the wound, including the famous Jesse James. Airguns are really the same power level as those small caliber cap and ball projectiles.
Now what you did not ask or put in your question is why your doing it, is it legal is it a good option?
No it is probably not legal, and there are always better options, but sometimes for whatever reason it is what we are forced to use. I get deer thru the 8 foot fence in the vineyard, I am perfectly confident that the 22 Condor with 32 grain slugs will kill them, he still has to get out that 8 foot fence while dying. On a unsupecting, calm deer, the heavier 25 will do the trick. If he is not chased and the conditions are ideal. But still there are so many better options.
I gave Shaggy a bad time about wanting to shoot deer with a 308 Corsair, and here I am telling you how to do it with a 25, so what is the difference.
Shaggy was touting that 308 as a giant killer, he was telling how he would do it during general deer season and it was in fact a buffalo killer.
Bullshit! He has a stable of better options.
You asked how to kill them with a 25 and I answered, you can do it, it will kill them with heart and lung shots. There are better options.
Roachcreek
Do you thing the Condor .25 cal will penetrated the deer all the way to the heart or lung? The Condor .25 cal may not have that power to take the deer down.
Get some 9 rings from Jerry on here very heavy , like a drill bit to the head. Shoot for the juggler is my advise.
Listen to Roachcreek! Save the headshots for the small stuff.
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I had a large(ish) deer in my sights the other night, about 70 yrds(with .25 55 fpe)
I did not take the shot.
Had I had my .22lr(160fpe) I would have popped him in the head as long as I got a side shot.
Last deer I shot was from 75 yrds(about) to the head with the .22lr and it dropped on the spot. Bullet was found about 2 inches inside the brain (again, a side shot just above the eye where I guessed least amount of resistance.)